Scotty Barker's Blog

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Monthly Archives: December 2013

f you are trying to make a mark in deliberate online marketing, then you should definitely try to utilize the different forums that are available online. To begin with, forums are excellent to get information. Thus, one should frequent these forums to establish one’s professional status. This can be done prior to actually starting to sell his/her product or service. Almost every full time marketer is fairly active on the various popular Internet Marketing forums. These serve as excellent medium to achieve brand awareness for one’s program.

These further serve the cause of generating several useful contacts. There are a lot of like minded people you can find online and these forums help on to garner networking prospects like never before. Thus the forums are extremely useful social mediums too.

One thing that you should definitely avoid while making use of the forums is to push your product indiscriminately and too frequently to ruin your professional image and lose all trust of fellow users.

There is only one way of garnering the trust of the forum members and holding on to it and this can only be done by offering information or services which are genuinely useful to fellow users along with a proper promotion through signature tags, valuable posts etc. There might also be the case when the forum would itself allow for promotion for example many forums have marketplaces where you can actually sell your products and services.

A significant part all online marketers efforts should be framed on forum marketing. This can prove to be another very useful equipment to create a brand of one’s own. To create a professional brand on a forum is the most efficient kind of promotion. Trust does not come as something easily buyable.

Once you start growing your opt-in list, youll want to ensure it is profitable. There are many ways to go about doing this. You want to make sure all your hard work is for a good cause, so you have to find ways to profit from your list. There are literally dozens of different methods you can employ to achieve results, but two seem to work better than all others.

The top two ways to profit from your list are also the easiest, so lets look at them:

1.Build trust and loyalty among your customers. Your customers will not buy from you unless you are able to prove your worthiness. So, you have to spend notable time working to build their trust. You can do this many ways. You can join forums that talk about the products or service industry you have an interest in, and look for experts in your field to offer their advice and recommendations to your subscriber list.

Also, make sure your website is clear and offers your visitors relevant and important information they will find helpful during their journey. If you are practicing affiliate marketing, and even if you are not, make sure you tested or tried any products you plan to sell so you can provide your subscribers honest reviews of them. This is the #1-way to build trust, and trust always leads to higher profit margins.

You should also build a user-friendly website, one that has a navigation bar placed in a prominent location. Make sure you provide your customers with a contact us page and always respond to customer or visitor inquiries within 48 hours if this is possible. The sooner you get back with your visitors, the better reputation you will build.

When responding to customers that contact you through your website, make sure that you remind them to sign up for your free newsletter if they havent already, which will contain more information on the subject they are looking for. Dont automatically assume they want to be subscribed to your newsletter just because they asked a question on the topic. Tell them what your newsletter offers, and how they can subscribe.

When you build trust and loyalty, your customers are also more likely to refer your business to their friends and their family. Some web owners design a page after the order page that allows the customer to input the names and emails of two to three of their friends that might also be interested in your products. This is another simple way to build your list. Make sure you provide them an incentive for checking you out, in the way of a free report, book, checklist or newsletter subscription.

2.Fulfill your subscribers needs. Everyone has needs. The whole point of doing business on the web is to fulfill the needs of people surfing the Internet. If you want to make money selling a product or a service, you first have to find out how that product or service will fill your prospects needs. How will they benefit from the product or service you offer? Have other people benefited? If so, how and why? Providing your customers with this information will help you create a profitable opt-in list, one that will transform visitors into paying customers.

One of the simplest ways to tell your customers how you can fulfill their needs is by listing the ways you do this on your landing page, or on another prominent place on your website. Make sure you bullet each benefit and explain to the prospect exactly how you plan to serve them, and why your product or service is better than that of the competition.

The more content you provide, the more secure your customer will feel about their purchase. They are also more inclined to believe you are fulfilling a need they have.

Let us take a moment to look at the first bullet, trust. Many people fear that building trust among strangers will prove difficult. Realistically speaking, anyone can build trust easily. How do you build trust?

First, run a legitimate business that you know something about. Dont try selling aromatherapy to someone just because it is a hot trend. You have to know what you are selling to sell it well. Next, if you want to encourage your customers to buy, offer them some form of guarantee. You can for example, offer them a 90-Day money-back guarantee on any products they use on your site, provided they use the products in the time frame appointed and have a legitimate reason for returning them.

Statistics show that even when customers do not feel satisfied with a product they will often not return it because they either (1) forget about it or (2) are too busy to mess with it. Nonetheless, when you build a guarantee into your sale, you put your customers mind at ease, and they consider their purchase less risky.

Lastly, provide your customers helpful hints and guidelines that will help them get the most benefit from your product. This shows your customer you have a vested interest in helping them succeed. This builds trust and loyalty, and converts subscribers to buyers. That is your goal to begin with.

Inspiration. Some say it is the key to great art. I think it is the key to a great many things. Most of our greatest successes and most tragic failures were sparked by inspiration. Why should our blogs be any different? What inspires you to create content for your blog? I don’t mean how do you get ideas, I am talking about a higher level here. What inspires you to post? The topic doesn’t matter, the feeling of wanting to post does. What gives you that feeling? A couple things that make me want to post to my blog are:

1. Music: I am a big fan of music (who isn’t?) and it is one of the my top inspirations. One reason it works for me is because I blog about music a lot. When I hear a great song, or great album, I instantly feel like blogging about it. Even if I wasn’t blogging about music, I would still be inspired by it. Music is really all about emotions. Certain songs can effect our moods, and sometimes those emotions will inspire us to create. Even lyrics without the music can inspire you if they are well written. Anything that effects your emotions can inspire you to create a blog post. If you are feeling down or uninspired, fire up your itunes and you might find yourself writing a blog post in no time.

2. TV: I know it is cool to hate TV these days – but besides the internet, this medium is one of the most all encompassing ones we have. You can see just about anything on TV, and anything you see can be possible inspiration. I was watching an old TV show the other day that reminded me of a certain part of my childhood, instantly I wanted to blog about it. When I watch the news, and see a topic I am passionate about I want to post my thoughts instantly. Even watching something as banal as realty TV can inspire you. Watching people react to each other under the pressure of the camera, can stir up a lot of emotions that lead to a great blog post.

3. Life: Everyday life can inspire as well. I am not talking about helping you think of blog ideas, I mean the inspiration to post…about anything. Whether you are inspired by positive factors, or negative ones – your life will throw enough of both at you. You will see beautiful things that make you want to post, and horrible things that will make you want to post. That is the reality of life. This is a good reminder for those people who are always connected to the net – sometimes going out and actually living your life will make your online work that much more effective.

Blogging regularly isn’t always thinking about content or topics. Sometimes you need to be inspired to post anything. By using music, television and living your life to the fullest you should be able to find reasons to post as often as possible. Next time you are struggling to produce content, leave the internet behind, and check out some of the above inspirations.

If youre a savvy business owner who is looking to get into the world of pay per click advertising, then youre already aware of the salience that low competition keywords hold. For those who arent aware, heres the long and short of it: low competition keywords are less obvious words that still relate to the product being sold by the merchant. For example, auto is a lower competition keyword as compared to car. Low competition keywords arent just limited to individual words, though a keyword could conceivably consist of a pair of words or even a phrase. Motorized vehicle would also be a keyword that has a lower competition rate than does car.

The question being, though, is that in the case that a business owner is searching for those low competition keywords, where might they be found? The first place to check is, of course, your own head. Or a thesaurus. Look up all the synonyms for your main high competition keywords that you can and see which ones seem to make the most sense insofar as your products or services are concerned.

Of course, the usefulness of the word game stops at some point. Low competition is important, but you also want the keywords to be relevant and current. For example, horseless carriage might well be a synonym for car, but its not exactly highly relevant in the current market. Its likely a keyword that has low competition, but its not very likely that a car dealership selling Ferraris is going to find it particularly helpful to their cause.

The real secret to using low competition keywords correctly is to find the keywords that are both low competition but yet highly searched for. Yes, these do exist! But where to find them?

The long and short of it? Software.

The bad news is that most of these software programs are paid deals. The good news is that once you have the software under your belt, it will end up saving you tons of money in the long run, so its definitely a worthwhile investment if youre looking to use low competition keywords to the best of what they can offer.

There are several software programs on the market that are entirely dedicated to finding what keywords are low competition but yet deliver a major impact on the Google charts. Another good thing about having the software that searches out these keywords be for-profit is that it means that not as many people are taking advantage of the software as could be doing so, so those low competition high click keywords stay ripe for your picking.

Simply do a Google search on keyword software and youll get several options from which to choose. Do some research and pick the program that seems most intuitive to you and then buy. You wont be disappointed, and youll make up the cost of the purchase in the long run.